A Shopping Comparison Engine's Traffic Doesn't Indicate Its Effectiveness

[Kristijntje]

There’s more than one way to gauge the power of a shopping search engine, and traffic is not necessarily the best measure of how a retailer might fare on one shopping engine vs. another...

Shopping search engines that score high in traffic—unique visitors—don’t necessarily score well in two other indexes tracked by Jupiter that play into the engines’ ability to direct traffic to e-commerce sites. Frequency of visits was defined as the average use days per visitor per month; intensity was defined as the number of pages on the site accessed per month. Jupiter’s study, based on data from this year, found that among shopping engines, Yahoo Shopping scored highest in the number of unique visitors but MSN Shopping scored highest in frequency of visits and PriceGrabber.com scored highest in the intensity index...

full article: http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=19744